Nefilim

The present state of the Moon and of Mars and other
celestial bodies does not imply that in the past they were equally desolate.
Concerning Mars and Moon we have the testimony of our ancestors, supported
by modern observations, that these bodies were engaged in near-collisions
only a few thousand years ago. It is not excluded that under conditions
prevailing on their surfaces prior to these events, life could have developed
there or elsewhere in the solar system to an advanced stage.

Working in the early 1940s on Worlds in Collision,
which in its original form covered also the cataclysmic events preceding
the Exodus, I wondered at a certain description that sounded like a visit
from space.(1)

The sixth chapter of the book of Genesis starts this
way:

And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on
the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them, that the sons
of God [bnei Elim] saw the daughters of men that they were fair;
and they took them wives of all which they chose.(2)

The story told in Genesis VI about the sons of God (bnei
Elim) coming to the daughters of men is usually explained as referring
to an advanced priesthood that mingled with backward tribesmen.(3)
When Columbus discovered America, the natives, according to the diary
of his first voyage, regarded him and his crew as having arrived from
the sky.(4) A similar
occurrence could have taken place in prediluvial times, when some invaders
from a remote part of the world came and were regarded as sons of
God.

But if we are today on the eve of interplanetary travel,
we must not declare as absolutely impossible the thought that this Earth
was visited, ages ago, by some people from another planet. Or was this
earth alone populated by intelligent beings? In my understanding this
passage from the book of Genesis is a literary relic dealing with a visit
of intelligent beings from another planet.

It appears that the extraterrestrial visitors made their
landing as if in advance knowledge of the impending catastrophe of the
Deluge.(5) It could be
that Jupiter and Saturn were approaching each other ever closer on their
orbits and that a disruption of one of them was expected.(6)

Possibly many centuries, or even millennia, passed between
the landing and the Deluge. The mission could have been undertaken to
ascertain the conditions on Earth. If it was an escape it could also have
been from another catastrophe in the solar system, one of those that preceded
the Deluge, like the one described as the dethronement and emasculation
of Uranus by Kronos. If the ancient legends of a battle between the gods
and titans, so persistent in the Greek world, but also in the mythologies
of other civilizations, have any historical value, we may try to find
what may have been the substratum of this fantasy. It seems that following
great convulsions of nature observable in the celestial sphere, giant
bodies were hurled on the earth. They arrived burned and were crushed
by impact.(7) But at least
one group of escapees suceeded in safely reaching the earth.(8)
They descended on Mount Hermon or Anti-Lebanon.(9)
Of the extra-biblical traditions dealing with the subject some reach hoary
antiquity, antecedent to the composition of the Biblical texts. The Book
of Enoch narrates that the group was composed of males only, two hundred
in number, under the leadership of one by the name of Shemhazai.(10)
The Aggadic literature says that the sons of God tried to
return to heaven from where they had come, but could not.(11)

The new arrivals were probably of gigantic staturetheir
progeny with women of the earth were giants:

The Nephilim were on earth in those days, and also
afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men, and
they bore children to them. These were the mighty men that were of old,
the men of renown.(12)

Having fathered giants, they themselves must have been
not of human size.(13)

The planet from which they came I would not know to
determine. El would refer to Saturn.(14)
The great size of the visitors would suggest a smaller body where the
gravitational influence would be less.(15)

Ten thousand years is only an instant in the life of
the cosmos; ten thousand years ago man was only in a rude stone age; today
he contemplates to visit other planets. If such progress is made in a
time as short as this, who knows what secrets are concealed in the past
or in the future?

References

Because the
story seemed so fantastic, I made up my mind at that time not to publish
anything on the subject when discussing the Deluge and still earlier
events. I came to this idea in 1940-41. In the 1950s many people
reported sighting UFOs , which were claimed to be vehicles of
visitors from other planets (a view which does not find any credence
with me). In 1957 the space age began, and by the late 1960s
, when the proposal that there were ancient visitors to Earth from
other star systems found its way into print, the idea provoked little
ridicule.

The Journal
of Christopher Columbus, tr. by C. R. Markham (London, 1893)October
14th, 1892: They asked us if we had come from heaven. One old
man came into the boat . . . to come and see the men who had come
from heaven.

Their story
in fact precedes that the of Deluge in the Scriptures.

[Later in this book Velikovsky
traces the cause of the Deluge to a disruption of Saturn by Jupiter.
See below, Part II: Saturn and the Flood.]

[Velikovsky
seems to be referring to the passage in Ovids Metamorphoses
describing the crushed bodies of the defeated giants: The terrible
bodies of the giants lay crushed beneath their own massive structures.
Transl. by M. Innes (London, 1955)]

[Analogous
accounts are reported from the New World. Cf. the Inca account recorded
by Pedro Cieza de Leon in the fifty-second chapter of his La Cronica
del Peru.]

In 1960 a Russian physicist and mathematician, M.
Agrest, came to the conclusion that the Baalbek stone was a platform
for ascent by ancient space travelers, and that Sodom and Gomorrah were
destroyed by atomic weapons. (Literarnaya Gazeta, February 9th,
1960). At the time I saw some alluring points in this thesisbut
I would strongly question the implication that extraterrestrial visitors
came to Earth as late as the Old Kingdom in Egypt, because this is the
time to which the Patriarch Abraham, a contemporary of the destruction
of Sodom and Gomorrah, belongs.

The Book
of Enoch VI. 6-7, transl. by R. H. Charles (Oxford, 1912).

Ginzberg,
Legends V. 172; Aggadat Bereshit.

Genesis 6:4

Previously
several correspondents engaged me on the subject; one correctly observed
that in order to procreate the visitors must have been of the same
species as man.

[Eusebius,
Praeparatio Evangelica IV. xvi; bnei Elim would more
correctly be rendered as Sons of the Gods and may possibly
be taken in the sense of Sons of the Planets, or Those
who Came from the Planets.]

[Several sources, including
The Book of Enoch and Clement of Alexandria (Eclog. Proph.
iii. 474, Dindorf ed.) maintain that the Nefilim brought with them
much astronomical and technical knowledge which they imparted to mankind.]